Classical Greece is the source from which many of the characteristic elements of Western culture derive, and therefore it makes sense to examine this culture. Epic poetry goes back to Homer, that is, to the earliest period of preserved Greek literature. But most literary work comes from Athens. In particular, the Fifth century in Athens was the scene for the development of many literary genres. Drama was developed by the tragedians of Athens (Aescylus, Sophocles, Euripides), comedy by Aristophanes. The writing of history begins with Herodotus and Thucydides. Modern philosophy goes back to the fourth-century authors Plato and Aristotle, though they have a number of important predecessors. Many of the forms of Western art and architecture we owe to the Greeks.
The Classical period of ancient Greece, in particular the experience of Classical Athens, established the humanist perspective of Western civilization. By "humanist" I mean the attempt to analyze human experience in purely human terms, without an elaborate divine superstructure. This explains why the Greeks invented the writing of history. This presupposes that there is a pattern to the development of human affairs, and that if one studies the story of that development one can learn from the past and apply that learning to human affairs. This idea is quite alien to many cultures, which view the world as an unchanging, divinely ordained construct. The Greeks, on the other hand, quickly used their reason to undermine belief in the traditional gods, and in many ways the development of Greek thought is an attempt to reach a new understanding of the nature of the universe and of man's place in it.
What was it about the Greeks that made them so influential in the development of human thought? There are three very characteristic aspects of Greek culture that led them to such fruitful results in so many aspects of life.
First, the Greeks were very curious. Most nations in antiquity had some form of explanation for why things are as they are, and on the whole people took the world for granted. Not the Greeks. They were strongly interested in abstract questions that were not raised by others. Where did the world come from? What is the purpose of human existence? What is the best way to organize human society? This sort of inquiry never appealed much to the Roman mind, for instance. When Herodotus saw a temple in Egypt that seemed to him to indicate that the Greeks borrowed their worship of him from there, he made a special trip to a temple in Phoenicia, and another to a temple on the island of Thasos to investigate the question.
The second characteristic of the Greeks is acuity of observation. This took place on two levels. The Greeks were keen observers of the natural world. Anaximander noticed fossils of sea life in the mountains, and used this fact in his explanation of the origin of the world. On another level, the Greeks were aware of the variety of human institutions. This conception encouraged the Greeks to come up with their own explanations for why things are as they are, and to attempt to improve upon the present state of things.
Finally, a salient characteristic of the ancient Greeks is a wide respect for human reason and an attempt to use it as a vehicle to explain existence. In part, this reason was used deductively. This means that reason was used to interpret rigorously the facts which the Greeks observed--for instance, the realization that the world is not unchanging was based upon the observation of fossils of sea life in the mountains. On the other hand, the Greeks had a tendency to use abstract reasoning in astonishing disregard of observable reality. Thus, one gets philosphers who argue that no motion is possible and that therefore nothing really moves, and other philosophers who argue that everything is in motion and nothing stands still. Either way, abstract reasoning is used to reach conclusions at variance with observable reality, and thus it is concluded on the basis of preconceived notions that the reality we see is a kind of figment. To some extent, the Greeks were "too clever by half." But really their establishment of the modern philosophical mode of thinking is an astonishing feat in itself, all the more so in light of the fact that modern philosophy was developed from scratch in the space of about 250 years.
Let us start with philosophy. Men in Ionia starting in the early 500s began to speculate about the nature of the world. A tradition arose of attempting to explain the world on the basis of observation. A later medical text says:
In medicine one must pay attention not to plausible theorizing, but to experience and reason together. I agree that theorizing is to be approved, provided that it is based on facts, and systematically makes its deductions from what is observed. But conclusions drawn by the unaided reason can hardly be serviceable. Only those drawn from observable facts are.
Here we have a strong disinclination to get involved in the sorts of abstract arguments that led to conclusions removed from reality. Thus we have a tradition of using reason to discern the pattern in the world.
At the same time a habit arose of attempting to explain the physical world on the basis of preconceived, abstractly argued reasoning. As already noted, this line of reasoning eventually led one philosopher to conclude that all motion was impossible, another to conclude that everything was in motion. Both had to explain why the perceivable "real" world did not "seem" to be the way the theories indicated that it "had" to be. This sort of thinking tended to win out in the long run over the more empirical traditions of Ionia.
Eventually, there was a reaction against abstract rumination on the nature of the universe and an increasing interest in the nature of human existence. In the mid 400s there arose a class of individuals called sophists ("practitioners of wisdom"). These men made a living by claiming to teach "arete". This is a word eventually comes to mean "virtue" in the philosophical sense. In origin it meant "suitabilty for some particular task," and came to mean "excellence." These sophists had no fixed teaching, but tended to share certain characteristics.
This sophistic method of reasoning had a strong tendency toward amorality. It was widely thought that the sophists taught the ability to argue that the worse case is the better. Another result was the belief that since traditional values had been shown to be mere convention, and since philosophical speculation had removed the divine from human affairs, morality was purely relative and the advantage of the more powerful was itself "good". Thucydides portrays this as a principle aspect of Athenian policy during the Peloponnesian War. By no means did every agree with these "immoral" trends, and the sophists and their followers were widely criticized. The most famous such critic was Socrates.
Socrates (469-399) went around asking those who were said to be knowledgeable about the abstract nature of their knowledge, generally finding that they had none. He was widely held to be a sophist, but was not one at all. He wished to find the "arete" for a human being, and found it in morality. For him, the good was not the relative advantage of any individual. Instead, he attempted to show that the good was not relative but an absolute principle, and that knowledge of what is right leads one to do it. Thus, in Socrates' reasoning, immorality is basically a form of ignorace.
This idea was borrowed by the Romans, and was one the guiding principles of the humanism of the Renaissance. Ultimately, the idea that human institutions are conventions based on nomos and thus can be just as well modified combines with Socratic ideal of the perfectability of man to result during the French revolution and the Bolshevik Soviet Union in the attempt to use the power of the state to destroy tradition (and anyone in favor of it) and to create a "new man." (But that's a topic for a different course.)
In his conversations Socrates used irony (pretended to be merely an ignorant man interested in asking questions), and generally annoyed everyone. In particular, his tendency to rely on comparisons with various trades led him to be hostile to the principle of the democracy: just as the man who is most knowledgeable in sea-faring should be appointed captain, so too should the state be put in charge of those most competent rather than just anybody as was a basic tenet of Athenian democracy. (While there is some theoretical force to this argument, in practice it is not so easy to identify the skills necessary for running the state or to determine from what perspective the competence of the management of the community is to be assessed.)
After the Athenian democracy was restored in 403 an amnesty was proclaimed. Many considered Socrates a sophist and blamed the conduct of the Thirty Tyrants on him (one of the worst had been a follower of Socrates'). In 399 Socrates was charged with corrupting the youth as a way to get around the amnesty. He used his trial to abuse the democracy, and fewer jurors voted to convicted in the first place than voted for the death penalty (he insulted the jury between the two decisions).
Socrates himself left no writings, and we know about him mainly from the works of his follower Plato (c. 429-347). Plato attempted to find an absolute basis for morality, and presented his views in a large number of dramatic dialogues. The modern form of abstractly argued, theoretical philosophy was created by Plato's pupil Aristotle (384-322).
I've dwelt on philosophy as one example of the fertile Greek mind. In a number of other areas, the Greeks founded some of the basic forms of Western thought. To some extent it's not much use in talking about literature without reading, it but we'll allude to a few.
Athens became the literary center of Greece. Although literature in the earlier period flourished in many places, the literature of fifth- century Athens came to be seen as the best, and eventually in a somewhat modified form the language of Athens replaced the other dialects.
Tragedy began sometime in the 500s (origins not clear). A tragedy was a play performed in honor of the god Dionysus. Three authors competed: each presented a set of three plays plus a funny finale. There were actors and a chorus. The words were in verse. There was an award for best playwright, actor and producer. Sometimes the subject was historical, but mostly the presentation of a mythological story. Moden sense of tragedy (a character flaw leading to the downfall of a basically good person) not true of all Greek plays. But they did treat of themes reflecting the human condition. For instance, Sophocles' Antigone is about the nature of absolute justice (the tyrant Creon has ordered that the body of Antigone's brother, who had rebelled against him, not be buried, but Antigone insists on doing so as an act ordained by the gods). In this play, Sophocles is clearly arguing against the sort of moral relativism espoused by the sophists. His Oedipus Rex is about the fallibility of human knowledge, and an attack on the faith placed in abstract reasoning. (Oedipus has saved the city of Thebes once with his reason and thinks he can do so again when there is a plague, but all he winds up doing is showing that he really doesn't know anything and destroying himself.)
As one can see in the plots of Sophocles, the Greeks had a strong sense that greatness leads to overweening pride and that the divine order humbles the proud. This is one theme of Herodotus' monumental history of the Persian invasion of Greece. Xerxes is the personification of arrogant pride and is brought low by the free Greeks. Thucydides rejects this theological interpretation of human affairs in his history of the Peloponnesian war. He believes that there is a discernible pattern to human affairs based on human nature and that a study of past events can lead to a better understanding of human affairs. There are no gods in his work, and his work marks the beginning of a historical understanding of human affairs.
Thus the Greeks are the fountainhead of our modern way of viewing the world. Human reason can be used to interpret human affairs in light of a logical human development. This view was passed on to the Romans, and in late antiquity the theology of the Christian church was fused with this tradition of pagan rationalism and humanism. This made medieval western Christianity much less abstractly theological than would otherwise have been the case. During the renaissance, when direct knowledge of Greek texts was revived in the west, the Greeks exerted a more direct influence on western thinking. It is hard to underestimate the significance of Greek thought on the modern world.